Editorial Notes

In June we received a letter from Robert Crosman of Trinity College, Connecticut, expressing objections to pedagogical extensions of the method employed by Jacques Barzun in "Biography and Criticism-a Misalliance Disputed" (Critical Inquiry, March 1975). We believe Mr. Crosman's objections sufficiently interesting to warrant printing below, not for his characterization of his graduate education which we cannot, of course, judge, but for his description of a danger potential in any approach to literature:


Critical Inquiry
Winter 1975 393 disaster. For the message of the "historical critic," both in the classroom and in print, is that understanding Donne's sonnets, or Richard II, or the Faerie Queene, is the last reward of consummated scholarship. He estranges us from our literature, then steps into the gap with his "expertise." Much of what Barzun has to say is of course just good sense, like the superiority, when the two disagree, of "intuition" to "the received opinion." Yet existing in a profession that I perceive as still seriously deformed from its true function of making the pleasure and instruction of literature available to the populace at large, I can't help being nervous over his celebration of one of the principle instruments of deformation. Nor does his argument bear out his confidence in "history" to unlock mind-forged manacles. Take Barzun's example of his own discovery of the genesis of Berlioz's "Corsair" overture. According to Barzun himself, he perceived "independent musical form" in the piece, but was able to "demonstrate" it only by a d~marche into the composer's biography. Historical attitudes play a strange role in this story, for they are not only its collective hero but its villain as well. After all, it was the misguided general notion that Berlioz's music was bad because the composer was "literary" (a supposed biographical fact) that had to be corrected by Barzun's discovery that the overture had in fact no literary genesis (a real biographical fact). "History" in short removed an impediment that "history" had previously set, and while Barzun corrected a particular mistake in "received opinion," he actually strengthened a far stronger general prejudice in favor of the biographical understanding of works of art. An audience not laboring under that prejudice would never have closed its ears in the first place to Berlioz's "independent musical form." What we really need to know at this point is what enabled Barzun to have his fresh perception of the musical form of "The Corsair." Was it his immersion in Berlioz's biography? Was it some mysterious feeling for musical form? If I were to argue the latter, I would make an argument as full of holes as Barzun's own. An intuition is an idea or feeling that no system or methodology can account for.
What does seem certain is that there is far too little of this intuitive gift around nowadays, at least inside the academy. Intuitive understanding of the sort that gives us back a great composer happens so seldom today that it seems something rare and precious, the gift of only a few geniuses, yet a closer look at our methods of teaching (the humiliation of the student, the inculcation of respect for "authority" and "expertise") shows that they are designed to stamp intuition out.
Systems and methods are not dispensible-we need preconceptions and generalizations in order to make provisional orderings of the welter of phenomena around us. But we also need to "demythologize" such systems, to permit in our students and ourselves that healthy independence of all systematic thinking that enables us to see for ourselves what is there. The true dialectic is, or should be, not between historical and structural ways of thinking, but between systematic and intuitive ways. If there are too few Jacques Barzuns around, it is because we are throttling them in the cradle.
Since Jacques Barzun "never answers criticism or objection-unless it includes brazen misrepresentation," we should like to make our own brief comment on Mr. Crosman's views: We know of no method for the study of literature-whether historical, biographical, critical, psychological, anthropological, or other, no matter how valid-which may not be misused if it is interpreted as the way to arrive at the truth.
In September we received a generous note from Roy Harvey Pearce in which, among other matters, he suggests, "Surely-because of the connection with Hiawatha and all that-"finished music" should read "Finnish music"-this on p. 707, current Critical Inquiry, in the first of the two Borges pieces you print" ("Walt Whitman: Man and Myth," June 1975). We thank Professor Pearce for his correction and regret the error in our transcription of Sr. Borges' talk.